Have you ever noticed that the more prepared someone is to compromise their way out of a disagreement—the more willing they are to say, “Alright, alright: we’re both wrong,”—the more likely it is that, in all actuality, all of the fault lies with them? Or maybe it just seems that way because I’m living with a teenager.
In many ways living with a teenager is like living with an insurance adjuster: there is no tragedy that can befall you that is not, somehow, just a tiny bit your own fault. (Or, as is more likely, 51% your own fault.) Just like my mother once had an insurance adjuster tell her that she was ten percent at fault for being rear-ended, since the accident “would have never occurred if she hadn’t been driving at the time,” a teenager can never quite accept the idea that, sometimes, there are things that are entirely one person’s fault.
Well, no, that’s not quite true: they can easily accept that sometimes things are entirely your fault: the tricky part is getting them to accept that things are sometimes entirely their fault as well. Oh, sure, they’ll admit that something was a little bit their fault. They’ll take a fraction of the blame—just as long as you are there to willingly pick up your “share” as well. The other day my son called me from school to ask me if I could come pick him up, which I thought was a little odd, since his sister was supposed to give him a ride both to and from school that day. He assured me, however, that neither her nor her car were anywhere to be found. Confused and a little worried, I called her to find out what was going on—remarkably, it only took three phone calls and two texts for her to answer her phone and explain the situation to me.
She was on a field trip.
“Oh”, I said. “That certainly would have been a useful piece of information for me.”
“I told you last week I was going on a field trip,” she replied.
“Did you tell me what day? And that it meant you couldn’t give your brother a ride home from school?”
“Well, no, but you should have known. I mean, this is partially your fault, too, you know.”
No, actually, I didn’t know. I didn’t know how “failure to develop, hone, and implement psychic powers in a timely fashion,” was even a category of fault. But I did understood a little better how the person who is denied full compensation on their homeowner’s insurance because, “After all, you did build your house under a meteor shower” felt. Or the woman who was denied treatments for breast cancer because “Having breasts is considered a pre-existing condition.”
Still, I suppose I should consider this progress, of a sort. At least she is now willing to consider giving me a mea culpa, even if it is more of a mea (a little bit) culpa. That’s better then before, when she could have stood over a corpse with a bloody knife in her hand and said, “What? It’s not my fault.” Or worse yet, pointed to the body and said, “He did it.” Now at least she might admit, “I may have played a small role in this,” before tossing the knife aside.
Of course, she would probably still add: “But I wouldn’t have been able to stab them if they hadn’t been here for me to stab,” or some such variation on the theme.
Oh well. To paraphrase Ted Knight’s immortal line from Caddyshack: “The world needs insurance adjusters, too.”